psalms on Fearlessness

Heavenly Father, we have forgotten your generosity and kindness. Believing you hold back from us, we have held back from others and from you. Gracious God, hear our confessions , and make us mindfu...

God of mercy, deliver us from our fear in which we judge others. We pray for all who are oppressed, imprisoned, persecuted or rejected. To you who have delivered us from slavery we pray for the faith ...

I…vividly remember one of my teachers telling the story of three young boys whose route to school went alongside a high wall. Every day as the boys walked to school, they wondered what was on the othe...

In Lancelot , one of Walker Percy’s final novels, the narrator reflects on his own struggle with idleness and addiction to entertainment. In a poignant scene set outside his Mississippi mansion, ...

Courage is Fear That has said its prayers.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...

Faith is a free surrender and a joyous wager on the unseen, unknown, untested goodness of God.

We're afraid when we're suddenly caught off our guard and don't know what to do. We're afraid when our presuppositions and assumptions no longer account for what we're up against, ...

How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

The Gospels list some 125 Christ-issued imperatives. Of these, 21 urge us to “not be afraid” or “not fear” or “have courage” or “take heart” or “be of good cheer.” The second most common command, to l...

Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; ...

Pastor: Lord God, we thank You that You have taught us what You would have us believe and do. Help us by Your Holy Spirit, for the sake of Jesus Christ, to hold fast Your Word in our hearts.  You ha...

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

A fourteenth-century definition of courage is “to speak one’s mind by telling all of one’s heart.” Courage is connecting one’s heart back to one’s mind, stitching together the separated parts of ourse...

We’re afraid when we’re suddenly caught off our guard and don’t know what to do. We’re afraid when our presuppositions and assumptions no longer account for what we’re up against, and we don’t know wh...

Faith isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice to trust God even when the road ahead seems uncertain.

You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’

Every now and then it shows through the clouds that are moving across its face. One moment it looks like the eye of a hawk in profile. The next it looks like the eye at the top of the pyramid on a dol...

It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.

In this short excerpt written by the Christian Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas to his godson, he pontificates on the topic of courage: Usually courage is identified with dramatic and heroic acts. Though I...

Faith is dead to doubts— dumb to discouragements, blind to impossibilities, knows nothing but success. Faith lifts its hand up through the threatening clouds, lays hold of Him who has all power in hea...

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

In April 1988 the evening news reported on a photographer who was a skydiver. He had jumped from a plane along with numerous other skydivers and filmed the group as they fell and opened their parachut...

Fear is a “mighty wind” indeed. The wreckage left by the toxic wind of fear is evident everywhere. We are afraid of the unknown, afraid of one another, afraid of poor health, afraid of death, and afra...

Father, we confess to boasting in success and security. We have denied you rather that desire you. We have cowered when we needed to be courageous. Jesus, we long to be people who follow you, no...

A common trait of human beings is a fear of failure. Most of us find ways of coping with it, but whenever failure rears its ugly head, it’s difficult not to experience the sting of feeling like we are...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind—these are all a dr...

Someone once said that faith is not a personal possession until you have suffered. That person understood that the very nature of faith requires the grit and courage to be in the dark so you can event...